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​Verona - Florence

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​​Today was meant to be a quick and easy day, and like all of our quick and easy days it ended up being long and drawn out.  We left Verona fairly early to head to the Ferrari factory in the nearby town.  Not being into cars I was not particularly excited about the excursion, but knowing I could use it for leverage for a food-based excursion at a later date I put on my happy face. 

I was unexpectedly pleased, it was interesting and fun.  The cars were really cool, models from the sixties look like some stuff you see today, showing you how far advanced they were.  I associate Ferrari with the late 90’s early 00’s version, the gaudy overdone ‘look-at-me’ futuristic looking ones, I do not particularly care for them. But the earlier cars were cute and very cool, I can see a bit of Milo in them.  It had a cool bit where you could see all the movies that featured Ferraris. I enjoyed that.

The plan was to make a quick stop, and then make the easy drive to Florence so we would have tonight and all day tomorrow to see the city (as there’s meant to be loads to see), that did not happen.  Shortly after the factory we noticed the temperature gauge slowing climbing, we pulled over to let me him cool down just in time to see smoke billowing out of him and fluid pouring out of our “overflow pipe”. This was not good. We extrapolated theories on the cause of the problem by consulting our books (The Haynes Manual and the more useful Dummies Guide to Car Repairs) and our finely tuned mechanics brains, our conclusion was to add more fluid to the radiator and hope for the best. 

We didn’t get far, ten minutes later the temperature was back in the red, ugh.  We pulled over again to see fluid literally pouring out of poor Milo.  So we did some more thinking and reached no conclusions.  Our theories were varied and far reaching: water in radiator evaporated overnight in the heat, pipe was worn out, a hole somewhere, we had overfilled the radiator, broken water pump (some books were consulted), Milo doesn’t like white rap music and was protesting, some theories were better than others.  Our solution?  Add more fluid and drive on, hopefully find a mechanic soon and hope it’s not too expensive.

We found Mario’s garage in some Italian one horse town shortly thereafter, though we thought our fix may have worked as the temperature gauge hadn’t gone up.  Mario seemed to enjoy us despite the fact that we pulled in at 4:30, lucky for us it was just the cap to the radiator. Milo drives another day!

Unlucky for us by this time our 2 pm estimated arrival time was long gone, we pulled in and found our hotel around 6, enough time to take nap from a very draining day and then finally get out around 8 pm.  Having just come from a very beautiful city we weren’t immediately impressed by Florence, until we saw the Bastilla, then we were impressed.  Tomorrow is tourist day before our sprint down to Rome for a short jaunt back to England for the end of the Olympics.